Oyster: A Gorgeous New App Offering Unlimited Books for $9.95 a Month

Oyster is a subscription service that offers users unlimited books for $9.95 a month. Image: Oyster

By now, we’ve all gotten pretty used to not owning stuff—at least in the traditional, hold-it-in-your-hands sense. If you’re anything like me, your DVD collection stopped growing a few years back once Netflix and Hulu bolstered their offerings. And that CD storage stand (hell, even your iTunes account) has probably gathered dust thanks to Spotify and Rdio. But books? Turns out, we’re still content to pay $10 for a paperless novel that we’re not even certain we’ll like or finish. The publishing industry is among the last holdouts in the ongoing transition from owning media to accessing it through a monthly service, but that’s about to change with the launch of Oyster, an app released today for the iPhone that’s looking to transform the way you read and pay for books.

“You don’t have to decide, do I want to spend $12.99 on this single book?”

Maybe you’ve heard that claim before. Kindle does have its lending library, and your local library already allows you to digitally check out books. But when I say Oyster is different, that’s because it is. For $9.95 a month you get unlimited access to more than 100,000 titles, and according to the founders, that number is growing daily. You can jump from Jessica Alba (yes, Jessica Alba wrote a book) to Charles Bukowski with the same ease of shuffling from Katy Perry to J Dilla on Spotify. There’s no pressure to finish either since users can add as many books as they’d like to their reading list, and the last 10 opened will instantly be downloaded for offline reading.

Created by Willem Van Lancker, Eric Stromberg and Andrew Brown, Oyster’s main goal is to make the process of finding and reading books much easier than it has been in the past. “You don’t have to decide, do I want to spend $12.99 on this single book?” explains Van Lancker. “Rather, you can just tap and get into it.” The founders figure that by removing the purchasing process, people will spend less time hemming and hawing over buying a book and more time actually reading it, which hopefully will lead to more revenue for the publishers, authors and Oyster (Stromberg wouldn’t delve into business model details, but he says it’s a “win-win-win” for all parties involved). “We want to eliminate the barriers to get you into content because we know that the most enjoyable experience someone is going to have with Oyster is finding a book that they fall in love with,” he says.

Users can choose from five visual themes (three pictured), which customize everything from typeface to background color and texture. Image: Oyster

Reading a book on Oyster is distinctly digital, but doesn’t feel soulless.

The app does make finding books easy. Van Lancker, formerly a designer at Google and Apple, and Brown, who was also at Google as an engineer, created and designed an app that more or less engineers discovery. The home screen functions like a digital bookstore browsing table, highlighting the bold covers of editor-curated titles and enticing readers with accolades and reviews. Each book has a “related” tab, which points you in the direction of similar titles, and the app’s social function will help you find good reads via your friends. Like most apps, the more you read, the better the algorithm is at guessing what you’re into, and with Stromberg’s experience at Hunch, you can bet that the recommendation engine is going to become an increasingly important feature.

Reading a book on Oyster is a distinctly digital experience, and yet, it doesn’t feel soulless or straining in the way reading on a screen often can be. This is largely due to Van Lancker’s thoughtful approach to the app’s design, which ties in his experience typesetting books during college. “There are things that people hold onto emotionally with books that we should carry over, and there are things we should leave to print books,” he explains. Things like highlight cover art or knowing your place in a story. “When you read a physical book, you know how far though you are by feeling it, right? explains Stromberg. “When you use the reader you’ll see we have a few indicators of your progress visually so you’ll get that same sensation you get when you’re reading a physical book.” Oyster relies on percentages and a timeline to indicate overall progress on a book, but in a clever, human-centered design move, the app uses smaller units—pages and estimated minutes left in a chapter—to guide readers along while they’re inside a book.

This is what your profile page looks like on Oyster. You can check out what your friends are reading under the Activity tab. Image: Oyster

Some of Van Lancker’s design choices purposefully deviate from the standard e-reading experience. “I think e-books have stagnated a bit,” he says. “I think we’re still very much looking at the 1.0 of what a digital book can be.” Little details like replacing page-turn animations with standard, sticky pagination that allows readers to follow the natural flow of text while reading vertically. And features like readability are enhanced by allowing users to choose from five Instagram-like themes. “The different ways you can design and typeset a book are nearly unlimited, but a print book is always just that, ink on paper,” says Van Lancker. “With the digital screen we are able to tweak everything from light-height and typeface to background texture and text-size.” It’s a nice touch for an otherwise cleanly-designed interface.

Ultimately, Oyster isn’t gunning to replace print books. Think of it the same way you approach music: You can buy vinyls of the albums that mean a lot to you, but Spotify and Rdio are far superior for exploring and discovering what you want to listen to next. Like all access-model services, Oyster’s long-term success relies on its ability to offer its users in-demand content. So far they’ve signed on big publishers like HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman and Rodale (to name a few) as well as indie book distributor Smashwords. That should be enough to get you started, but if not, you can bet they’ll grow that list even more once the service launches on iPad later this fall.